A Family Full of Unhappiness, Hoping for Transcendence

Jonathan Franzen’s galvanic new novel, “Freedom,” showcases his impressive literary toolkit — every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life. With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters.

Whereas Mr. Franzen’s first novel, “The Twenty-Seventh City,” borrowed liberally from the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo to create a dark, splashy picture of a futuristic St. Louis, his 2001 bestseller, “The Corrections,” signaled his determination to write an American sort of “Buddenbrooks,” to conjure contemporary America — not by going for a cartoonish, zeitgeist-y epic but by deconstructing a family’s history to give us a wide-angled portrait of the country as it rumbled into the materialistic 1990s.

While “The Corrections” attested to Mr. Franzen’s discovery of his own limber voice and tamed his penchant for sociological pontification, the novel was something of a hybrid in which the author’s satiric instincts and misanthropic view of the world sometimes seemed at odds with his new drive to create fully three-dimensional people. It felt, at times, as if he were self-importantly inflating the symbolic meaning of his characters’ experiences, even as he condescendingly attributed to them every venal quality from hypocrisy and vanity to paranoia and Machiavellian conniving.

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In the opening pages of “Freedom,” this dynamic seems even more exaggerated, as we are introduced to members of the Berglund family as an assortment of disagreeable caricatures, who perplex and perturb their neighbors in St. Paul. Known for his “niceness,” Walter Berglund is a weak, passive-aggressive husband and father, who weirdly sells out his nature-loving ideals to work with an evil coal company. His wife, Patty, also seems “nicey-nice” on the surface, but turns out to be an ill-tempered shrew, who rages at Walter and inexplicably slashes a neighbor’s new snow tires. Their cocky teenage son, Joey, is so unhappy at home that he moves out of the house and in with his girlfriend’s family next door.

It turns out, however, that these farcical sketches are simply meant to show how the Berglunds might be perceived by outsiders, just as Patty’s account of this period of her life, which immediately follows in the book, reflects her own need to filter everything through the prism of her anger and depression. As “The Corrections” dramatically demonstrated, Mr. Franzen is extremely adept at depicting those two emotions — which not just Patty, but nearly every character in this novel suffers from, too, and which all of them trace back to injustices or slights suffered at the hands of their parents.

As the novel proceeds, however, Mr. Franzen delves further into the state of mind of his creations, developing them into fully imagined human beings — not Nietzschean stereotypes easily divided into categories of “hard” (shameless, ambitious brutes) or “soft” (pathetic, sniveling doormats); not bitter patsies fueled by ancient grudges, but confused, searching people capable of change and perhaps even transcendence.

We come to understand the dynamics between the earnest and eager-to-please Walter, a good soldier reeling with suppressed rage; and Patty, college athlete turned housewife, who indulges in alcohol and sarcasm to assuage her sense of uselessness and loss. We also come to intimately know Walter’s best friend, Richard, a cool, charming musician and compulsive womanizer, whom Patty first fell in love with decades ago and with whom she later has an affair.

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Jonathan Franzen, the author of the novel “Freedom.”Credit
Greg Martin

Mr. Franzen’s repeated allusions to “War and Peace,” suggesting that there is some sort of parallel between the Walter-Richard-Patty triangle and the Pierre-Andrei-Natasha triangle in Tolstoy’s great classic, are laughably conceited, but he does an agile job of tracing the constantly evolving relationships among his three main characters, as well the dynamics between Walter and Patty, and their two children, Joey and Jessica. He understands the improvised game of emotional dominoes that can play out in families, and the psychological chutes and ladders that can pop up in their lives out of the blue.

From the start of his career with “The Twenty-Seventh City,” Mr. Franzen has been ambitious, striving to write a Big American Novel that might capture a national mind-set, and this novel is no exception. Its title, “Freedom,” announces a theme that runs like a riptide beneath the narrative — lots of talk about what liberty means in terms of being free of familial responsibilities and ideological beliefs, and the rootlessness and dislocation that often follow in its wake.

But it is neither this heavy-handed leitmotif nor the twisty, Dickensian plot (which has Walter and Joey getting involved with a ruthless Halliburton-like company) that lends this novel its narrative heft and hold on the reader. Rather, it is Mr. Franzen’s characters and his David Foster Wallace-esque ability to capture the absurdities of contemporary life — where the planet is “heating up like a toaster oven” and people use credit cards to buy a pack of gum or a single hot dog (“I mean cash is so yesterday”), where rage among liberals and conservatives alike is scorching the country in the George W. Bush years, and intemperate blog entries and Howard Beale-like outbursts are cheered as expressions of a collective distemper.

Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy (what happens to Joey after he accidentally swallows his wedding ring right before a vacation with his dream girl) as he is at grown-up tragedy (what happens to Walter’s assistant and new beloved when she sets off alone on a trip to West Virginia coal country); as skilled at holding a mirror to the world his people inhabit day by dreary day as he is at limning their messy inner lives.

In the past, Mr. Franzen tended to impose a seemingly cynical, mechanistic view of the world on his characters, threatening to turn them into authorial pawns subject to simple Freudian-Darwinian imperatives. This time, in creating conflicted, contrarian individuals capable of choosing their own fates, Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet — a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times.

A version of this review appears in print on August 16, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Family Full of Unhappiness, Still Hoping for Transcendence. Today's Paper|Subscribe